Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

I think the problem is that the environment has changed and people are applying those changes post hoc to the previous environment and when laws were written. Things have changed a lot and I think we need to act accordingly. Continuing as if it all is the same is like boiling a frog, and it is surprising how fast you can turn up the heat. It may seem drastic, but I have seriously considered messaging dang to nuke this account. Not just delete it, but purge all text as well. A strong divorce from the standards, but that is because [deleted] used to be reasonably sufficient to hide one's identity. We now live in a world where I can reasonably expect to be deanonymized by my words alone and that it is not unlikely that this capacity will be in the hands of the public in the next 5-10 years, along with entire copies of the internet. I do think what we've seen with digging up old tweets will take on a new and pervasive form (likely with even more error). But going back to specifically recording...

The truth is that we live in a _very_ different world than when these laws were set up. The idea of reasonable expectation was very different because you wouldn't reasonably expect to walk down the street being recorded since cameras were bulky, expensive, and uncommon. Now every single person has one in their pockets, most businesses are recording you, you're being recorded from airplanes in the sky[0], and not too long from now satellites will (governments already have this capacity but commercial is near there[1]). You didn't have a reasonable expectation for the person standing next to you to be capable of recording your conversation. It was possible for them to wear "a wire" but the likelihood was very low. Likelihood being low is equivalent to "reasonable expectation." The reasonable expectation of not being recorded didn't come from being hidden or out of sight, it came from the fact that the technology either didn't exist or wasn't prevalent. Not it is ubiquitous. And despite it seeming so normal, most of this change happened in the last 20 years.

But we're getting to the next paradigm shift, which makes all the above even more pervasive. ML/AI. I say this as someone that works in ML/AI and loves the field with a passion (you'll see me discuss it a lot here). But the technology also has downsides (commonly referred to as "malicious AI"). It isn't AGI, it is the ML that already exists. We can identify faces in a crowd and track them across different videos. We can take that 2 pixel person, segment it, and track it (done manually in the radiolab referenced in [0]). We can identify a person by the way that they walk (gait recognition[2]). We can track you by your wifi and bluetooth signal within a building. And so much more. This technology has supercharged the surveillance ecosystem (not somewhere I work in, obviously) and you bet it is being used by countries who don't have the best human rights records (let's not make this a (who's) dick (is the ugliest) measuring contest). Things have changed well beyond what we could have reasonably assumed 20 years ago, even 10. Now, it is not unreasonable to believe that such systems will also perform on the web and that your text is likely identified by you patterns, not just your fingerprint.

And this is really it. This stuff is so prolific that we've erased our memory of the past and re-framed this "normal" behavior as applicable to the past and try to justify it. 20 years ago you could walk down the street and reasonably assume that you would not show up on any single camera. Moreso, you could reasonably assume that if you did, you wouldn't show up on many. That that video was unlikely to make it to the internet. And that that video would likely be low grade and unable to identify you. These are all different things, but combined they sum to the expectation that there would not be a record of your movement contingent upon your ability to be identified (same applies to the internet and our chat forums in a similar line of reasoning). __STOP JUSTIFYING "REASONABLE EXPECTATION"__ without recognizing that the ecosystem has rapidly changed and is significantly different from when those laws were written. You are not making a strong argument but rather just reinforcing the surveillance paranoia (as in, people who are paranoid[3] about surveillance will increase said paranoia due to increased relaxation coupled with "nothing to hide" mentality that enables said surveillance).

=== TLDR ===

Just because you were in public didn't mean you'd reasonably expect to be recorded. The ecosystem has rapidly changed and we need to recognize this. 10-20 years ago you didn't have a reasonable expectation to be recorded (video or audio) in public as {government,corporate,civilian} recording capabilities were far less.

[0] Note that this is 2016 and has only grown since then. If you don't like buzzfeed (I just quick googled) Radiolab has 2 episodes on it ("Eye in the Sky"). https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-t...

[1] Planet is getting ready to deploy a 30cm resolution (person = ~2 pixels) constellation called Pelican. It is not real time! But it shouldn't be unreasonable to believe it will be in the future. Current resolutions can already clearly identify cars. https://www.planet.com/products/pelican

[2a] PWC page https://paperswithcode.com/task/gait-recognition/

[2b] 2 random surveys: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09546 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13732

[3] Paranoia is a bad word because it implies an unjustified or unwarranted mistrust. I think we can all agree that to some degree there is justification. The disagreement is just how much. But I am using the term because it is more prolific and I think the context is appropriate to draw upon the dichotomy in how what was once thought to be tinfoil hat claims become reality: see Snowden. 50 years ago a person that claimed our every move would be tracked -- in the real world and virtual -- would have been called crazy. It was even the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Now we call that a Thursday.

> they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you

But like you said, they lied about you provoking them and destroyed the evidence showing that you didn't. Nobody will ever know that they beat you up just because you were recording.

I know why cops don't want body cams.

GrapheneOS

> And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones

Let's drop that. Instead, let's remember that 20 years ago there was not an expectation that someone would be carrying a microphone and camera on them. It was also less likely that one could do so without you noticing. Not to mention the quality of those devices was exceptionally lower, making identification harder and requiring you to be in much closer proximity. Take that back just another decade and a camera needed to sit on your shoulder, making you easily identifiable.

A problem with a lot of these conversations is that they're using modern technologies and notions in reference to laws that were written well before these things. There is a big difference between a very small number of easily identifiable people who require large resources to record the public, doing so in low resolution, and the modern notion of trivially doing so, and in high definition. Not to mention the ease/cost of storage, ability to search, and share that we have today. The Overton Window has shifted so much that we're completely forgetting the landscape differences.

You quoted my conclusion without any context and ignored multiple crucial details:

> You may have a chance to see justice because it won't matter if the cop and his 5 buddies say you provoked them with a camera. It's unambiguous that you can record them and there's no possibility of reasonable doubt if you're allowed to record them 100% of the time. There's no loophole they can use to say you can't record them due to privacy or safety or whatever other reasons they want to make up and they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you.

There won't be a lie they can spin because they won't have any justification for attacking a cameraman. Note I also said may and spoke of probabilities. Furthermore, I admitted it's only a partial solution so I'm not sure what gotcha you're going for here. I know it's not foolproof or perfect, it's merely better than what we currently have.